Surgeons, food service workers, and others who work in areas where contamination must be minimized, have long worn protective caps to contain their hair. For many years, such caps were fabricated of cotton and other reusable material such that one cap could be used many times. More recently, however, such caps have been made of lightweight inexpensive non-woven materials such as Nomex. Such materials are so inexpensive that protective caps and other items made therefrom can be used once and simply discarded.
In the past, the fabrication of disposable surgeon's caps has generally involved cutting circular blanks from a sheet of non-woven material and hand sewing an elastic strip around the perimeter of the blanks to produce the finished caps. While this method of producing surgeon's caps has been somewhat successful, it nevertheless has been plagued with numerous inherent problems and shortcomings. For example, since circular blanks are used, the non-woven material between the cut-out circles is typically unsuitable for any commercial purposes and is often discarded after the circles have been extracted. More importantly, however, no satisfactory method has yet been developed for automating the process of sewing the elastic strip around the perimeter of the blanks and manual stitching with a sewing machine is commonly employed. Present methods of producing these caps, therefore, are highly labor intensive with the result that the caps are often fabricated in third-world countries where labor is extremely inexpensive. Even with inexpensive labor, the manual sewing process is still inherently inefficient such that a large labor force is usually required to produce caps in reasonable commercial quantities.
Accordingly, a continuing and heretofore unaddressed need exists for an efficient automated method of fabricating disposal surgeon's caps that eliminates the need for a manual labor force and that produces caps of consistent high quality and unique design in commercially usable quantities. It is to the provision of such a method and a cap produced by the method that the present invention is primarily directed.